Traditional print magazines have long used compelling cover images to attract readers and encourage them to explore the featured articles. Exploiting the capabilities of digital information processing and the Internet can provide powerful and succinct displays of information to increase viewership and to facilitate selecting stories of interest for further exploration. Online news sites such as http://abcnews.go.com, http://news.yahoo.com, and http://news.google.com aggregate and display stories from all over the world. The main pages on these and like websites typically display stories or articles according to general categories such as “World”, “Business”, “Technology”, “Science”, “Technology”, “Entertainment”, “Top Headlines”, “Money”, “Opinion”, “Politics”, “Travel”, “Sports”, “Most Popular”, and the like. Creating and displaying a cover page related to a story, a topic, or a theme provides a much more engaging experience to users of the Internet. Thus, a need presently exists for a method and system for creating theme, topic, and story-based cover pages to induce viewers to explore news stories.
The main page for a news site typically encountered by an Internet user may list a selection of news stories identified by their headlines and allow selection of additional news stories from lists organized according to various categories. However, more viewers may be attracted by a large eyecatching image with an appropriate headline that links the viewer to more information. As they become more sophisticated and discriminating consumers of web content, users may find it interesting to view sets of stories having a particular theme, rather than stories belonging to a traditional category. For example, a user may be interested in viewing stories focusing on conflicts. The conflicts may comprise warfare in the Middle East, conflicts between the Vatican and other religious groups, conflicts between labor and management relating to strikes or protests, and other conflicts that are also unrelated by category. In this example, Middle East conflicts may fall in the general “World” category, and the labor/management conflicts may fall in the general “Business” category. Current news sites, however, generally do not provide thematic organization of news stories. They also do not select and display meaningful large images to identify stories, topics, or themes. Displaying a meaningful image with an appropriate headline or caption that encapsulates a theme, topic, or story, with links to allow viewing the substance of the story, fills the need of viewers for an appealing introduction to the information they are seeking.
A news story is frequently of interest to viewers not merely in and of itself, but also in the larger context. The context of a news story includes not only how the story is categorized, but also how it is presented by different news outlets, how it has developed over time, and how the story relates to people or institutions mentioned therein. Current news sites may present the story itself, but the viewer must then do his own further research to place the story in context. A service that presents a news story along with additional information about the story and about related entities is of clear value to Internet users.